Abstract

Recommend using UTF-8 as the character encoding format of the payload.

Status

Proposed

Rationale

Transmission of the payload is potentially unreliable because the client is allowed to use any character encoding. Not every server may be able to understand the more exotic character encodings. While this proposal does not change this ability, it does recommend the use of a uniform character encoding format. This recommended format should always be safe to use.

Proposal

The following paragraph would be inserted between the first and second paragraph of section 2.1:

It is RECOMMENDED that clients transmit the entity payload in the 
UTF-8 character encoding format. Servers MUST be able to handle the 
UTF-8 character encoding format and MAY handle any number of other 
character encoding formats.

Impacts

Backwards compatibility with previous TrackBack implementations. Current server implementations may not be able to handle the UTF-8 character encoding format.